A Directing Experience, Part 1

by Kirk Woodward 

[Last 8 March, my longtime friend Kirk Woodward e-mailed me, “It looks like the St. James Players will do ‘Antigone’ and I volunteered to be associate director if the dir[ector] would like.”   

[The Saint James Players of the Saint James Episcopal Church in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, is a troupe with which Kirk has previously worked.  James Broderick, a former journalist and editor, and currently a professor of English and a produced playwright who directed this Antigone, has performed with the troupe in a few Shakespeare plays and has directed twice.  

[At least once, Kirk and Broderick worked together at SJP—on a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which Kirk directed in September 2017, and which I saw.  (That production marked the Shakespearean début of Craig Woodward, Kirk’s son.)

[From the very start, Kirk saw this opportunity as a new experience.  “I’ve never directed [a Greek tragedy] and always avoided them,” he wrote me even before Broderick welcomed him aboard.  “I’m keeping a running commentary on ‘Antigone’ and it may turn out to be something [for Rick On Theater].”

[Soon after rehearsals began, Kirk told me, “The show is just plain different from anything I’d ever imagine.”  He clarified that he meant both the play and the production.  I was very curious to see what he meant exactly—after all, Kirk’s been directing plays of all descriptions—save Greek classics—for over 50 years.  It was hard for me to imagine anything that was beyond his experience.                                                                                         

[“‘Antigone’ is lurching toward opening.” Kirk wrote me two days before the first performance.  (SJP’s Antigone ran on 15-17 and 22-24 September at Upper Montclair’s Saint James Episcopal Church.)  “I’m finding the entire process quite confusing.”  He reiterated, “It’s a different experience, that’s for sure.”

[The work had been different from his usual experiences, and since those experiences are, as I intimated earlier, pretty solid and extensive, I was very curious about what actually went on.

[The hints Kirk dropped about the unusual nature of the rehearsals made me very curious about how it unfolded.  What I ultimately found fascinating in “A Directing Experience" is Kirk’s perspective—that he found that someone working in a way largely different from the way he directed—a sometimes frustrating experience—still ended up with a laudable result.  I think you’ll see this, too.]

In early 2023 the board of directors of the St. James Players, a theater group in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, with which I’m associated, voted to select Antigone, a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles (c. 497/6-406/5 BC) in 441 BC, for its September 2023 show.

Antigone takes up the ancient Greek story of the family of Oedipus, ruler of Thebes, who brought on the fury of the gods by inadvertently killing his father, Laius, and marrying his mother, Jocasta. Out of that union came two daughters, Antigone and Ismene, and two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, who, before the play begins, killed each other in a struggle for power. 

In Antigone, Creon, Jocasta's brother and now ruler of Thebes, declares that Polynices, who fought against Thebes in that civil war, should not be buried, in contradiction to religious practice. Antigone defies Creon’s order and Creon sentences her to death, with disastrous consequences.

I volunteered to assist the director in some capacity or other, and with his endorsement was named associate director with unspecified duties, and the production was ultimately approved. A friend told me I was like a “grandfather” to the play – not responsible for it, but available for tasks like baby-sitting in a pinch. My own image was that I was like an insurance policy – you should have one, but you hope you never have to use it.

The production that followed was unique in my experience as a director for two major reasons: I had never directed a Greek tragedy, and the director’s approach to the play and his method of directing it turned out to be significantly different from mine.

The director was Jim Broderick, whose book Greatness Thrust Upon Them I wrote about previously in this blog (see the report, posted on Rick On Theater on 27 May 2023; the introduction includes some of Broderick’s credits and experience). Jim is intelligent, enthusiastic, funny, and fulsome in his praise of others – in other words, he’s easy to work with. Jim has experience both as a director and as a playwright, with at least some of his plays on the experimental side.

We had a preliminary lunch in which he indicated he primarily hoped I’d be able to work with actors when multiple scenes were being rehearsed, an arrangement that was fine with me. However, this almost never happened.

Here are some of the considerations that made this experience interesting for me.

SELECTING A PLAY – I would guess that selecting a season of productions for a theater is the company’s most important decision. In the case of the St. James Players, ordinarily they put on one major production a year. This however did not make their choice easier. Essentially they had to choose between a radical concept for one of Shakespeare’s plays, and a Greek tragedy, Antigone.

Up to this point the group had performed only plays written by William Shakespeare (1564-1616). There was hesitation among board members about abandoning the “brand” of doing Shakespeare plays, and there was also uncertainty about the wisdom of choosing a Greek tragedy at all.

The choice didn’t seem to bother much of the audience, but I did hear that one audience member said, “I didn’t know that Shakespeare wrote Antigone.”

ANCIENT GREEK DRAMA – Classic Greek tragedies present problems for modern audiences. They are based on ancient legends and myths, which may be unfamiliar to an audience member today, and they may feel remote from today’s ways of looking at the world.

There’s also the issue that all the ancient Greek plays, comedies as well as tragedies, provide the characters of the play with a chorus representing the populace and, frequently, with popular wisdom as well. The chorus comments on the action of the play, sometimes encouraging and sometimes warning the central characters.

Few modern plays use a chorus of this type (although occasionally a single actor may play a role equivalent to that of the Greek chorus), and there is no performance tradition as to how such a chorus should sound or move.

What’s more, modern drama tends toward realism, even if the realism is exaggerated. Greek tragedy tends to sound formal and possibly “artificial” for a modern audience. Partly as a result, productions are relatively rare.

TRANSLATIONS – Obviously we could not perform Antigone in its original classic Greek. The logical candidate for a translation of the play was the 1939 version of the play (copyright renewed in 1967) by Dudley Fitts (1903-68) and Robert Fitzgerald (1910-85), a fine version with a modern feel but also with a flavor of what would generally be considered “classic” language.

We were more than willing to pay royalties for using the translation, but we could find no one to pay them to. We contacted publishers and agents, and we also consulted people whose specialty is the determination of theatrical rights.

No one could find an answer; some suggested it could now be in the public domain; so we decided to go ahead and use the translation with the understanding that if a legitimate copyright holder appeared, we would pay them at once. No such entity surfaced.

Jim worked hard on the script. He cut obscure references, trimmed some long speeches, and added some lines and one entire new scene (between Antigone and her sister Ismene as young girls). He also added musical and dance episodes to the script, describing them in detail. His aim was a production of 75 minutes (we actually came in at 70). All in all, his revisions to the script were significant.

DIRECTOR’S CONCEPT – We discussed his ideas for the play, few of which would have occurred to me. Well versed in classical studies, Jim wanted to give the audience a crisp production of Antigone, but his main interest was to give a taste of what it was like for those who attended the ancient Festival of Dionysus, a weeklong festival.

The beginnings of the festival, known as the Dionysia, are lost in the mists of early history, but by the time we know much about it, it included processions, sacrifices, statues and large phalluses, poetry competitions, and several days of competitive presentations of tragic – and, eventually, comic – plays.

From the start, Jim wanted to present not only the play itself but also at least a taste of what the festival itself might have been like. It took me a long time to understand this intention.

The production I pictured in my mind was significantly different from Jim’s idea. I visualized a production with basically two elements: the actors with character names, and the chorus. I saw the characters as basically enacting a modern drama, and the chorus as dynamically participating in it, moving frequently in groupings that formed “pictures” of their attitudes or what they were saying.

Jim envisioned four distinct elements: the named characters; the chorus; dancers (who he intended to represent the Muses, mythological beings that inspire the arts); and musicians. He visualized the audience entering the theater to see living “statues” that evoked the play; he wanted the dancers to be active throughout the play; he wanted masks and formalized speech, and he did not expect the chorus to be particularly mobile.

As far as I could tell, he visualized the acting style as formal, oratorical – I characterized it as “platform acting.”

As I said, his vision was not at all my own. On the other hand, I wasn’t there to promote my ideas but to support his, so I and the choreographer, my friend Colleen, tried to do just that.

BASIC STAGE LAYOUT – I felt that the sanctuary of the church (where the plays are performed) should be used just as it was, without curtains establishing a “stage” area. It’s a beautiful sanctuary.

Jim had the same idea. This turned out to be controversial for some members of the theater board, and we had to present the case for it with a great deal of determination. Arguments against it included the effectiveness of stage lighting and sound, which would be dissipated without curtains.

We prevailed in our artistic convictions; the objections were not frivolous, but we felt they were worth the risk, and after all we were the directors of the show. The board agreed, and what’s more we used neither sound nor stage lighting equipment.

CREATIVE TEAM – We met several times with musicians (recorder, guitar, and percussion) and with the choreographer, who also met separately with her dancers. The musicians and the choreographer circled around how they might best select music for the show – a task made more difficult because the percussionist, who really was the heart of the music, was away for an extended vacation, leaving guitar and recorder, not the loudest or most dynamic instruments.

Eventually a selection routine developed: a place for music in the script was identified, the musicians proposed a piece of music, it was accepted or replaced, and a rough timing was established – for example, thirty seconds of music (possibly to be changed if the activity on stage lasted a longer or shorter time). With patience we got through the process, and two days later the musicians and Jim recorded the pieces for rehearsal use.

Remarkably, there are actually a few extant pieces of music based on ancient Greek notation, as far as we’re able to understand it. However, the music selected for our production wasn’t ancient Greek except for one piece, and usually wasn’t Greek at all – for example, we used several pieces by the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok (1881-1945).

Jim had COSTUME ideas from the beginning; he didn’t exactly want to duplicate ancient Greek dress, but he wanted to evoke it. Shortly after rehearsals began, he suggested that the leading roles wear “modern dress.” We all batted this idea around a while, but by the time a volunteer for the position of costumer came aboard, the decision was for an antique look. (Togas, by the way, were Roman, not Greek.)

Ultimately a quite good costumer came onto the show (a volunteer, like the rest of us), and gave it a uniform look (pun not intended), at least somewhat Ancient Greek, on a pretty limited budget (around $1200), ordering many of the costumes from Amazon and doing some tailoring and accessorizing.

CASTING – We had been concerned that we wouldn’t have enough actors for the show – in particular, to fill the “chorus.” Jim adopted my suggestion that a good many of the choral speeches be assigned to individual voices rather than to the whole group, to give the chorus members more of a feeling of participation.

As it turned out, we had two nights of successful auditions, with plenty of possibilities for casting choices. Jim decided to use everyone who auditioned, and with some creative maneuvering, all were cast, and all accepted their roles except for one actor.

As the production went on, a couple of actors withdrew from the show, including one major role, but the losses had little impact. Jim told me an interesting story: after the show was cast, one of the actors asked him to split a role and give half of it to another actor who felt under-parted. Jim knew of course that this couldn’t be done; he could hardly take half an actor’s lines away.

After some thought, Jim created a new character, not a part of the play’s story but a participant in the pre-show activity, which continued to expand in conception. At this point I was feeling – keeping it to myself – that the play itself had hardly been considered yet, with the attention going to what someone referred to as the “window dressing.”

That is not the only or even the best way to characterize what was happening. Jim had a concept and he was making sure it was solidly established. Many rehearsals were ahead. Still, at that point I had reservations.

DOUBLE CASTING – The big casting decision Jim made was to double-cast the principal roles. One of the theatrical issues I’ve never thought much about is the question of double-casting roles in plays. As far as I know, double-casting seldom happens in professional productions in the United States. If there are recent examples I can’t think of them. (Note that double-casting is not the same as playing “dual roles,” in which one actor plays multiple roles in a single performance.)

At the community theater and educational theater levels, double-casting seems to be more common. Among the reasons for double-casting are:

POLITICS – one actor under consideration might be, say, the head of the organization, or the director’s spouse or partner, or a major contributor to the theater.

OPTICS – some might consider the company chairperson, for example, not as accomplished an actor as one of the members. Others might disagree – opinions aren’t always unanimous.

AVAILABILITY – good performers are hard to find, so why not use as many as possible?

REQUIREMENTS – a school, for instance, might be mandated to cast as many students in a play as can be made to fit.

(Here are two good articles on the subject: https://www.theatrefolk.com/blog/pros-cons-double-casting/ and https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/10/28/antaeuss-partner-casting-two-for-one-one-for-all/.)

Double-casting presents problems because it has the potential to double a director’s work, and therefore the rehearsal schedule. It’s ordinarily impractical to have two actors onstage at once rehearsing the same role, but obviously problematic to give the most important roles only half the rehearsal that other roles have.

The principal reason we wanted to double-cast was the high quality of candidates for several roles. After we saw that we had two strong candidates for the role of Creon, the main male role, we presented the idea of double-casting to the board, which agreed with some hesitation.

One issue was that we had scheduled five performances, meaning that some actors would have three performances and some two. We asked the church to approve an additional Sunday matinee and received approval.

The people in the roles we double-cast were not at all alike. In particular, the two Creons were radically different in acting styles, and the two Tiresiases could not have been more opposite physically.

REHEARSAL SCHEDULE – Jim created a rehearsal schedule. As is typical with community theater, particularly over a long period of time (we rehearsed over the summer, two rehearsals a week, Sunday and Monday nights, for roughly three months), the actors had numerous conflicts.

In general, Jim wanted a minimal rehearsal schedule.  In previous productions the company told actors that some Wednesday night rehearsals would be likely; Jim said there would be none. As it turned out, one cast got the majority of rehearsals because of absences and sicknesses over the summer.

Where two or three hours is a typical rehearsal length, at least for me, Jim said rehearsals would be from 7PM to 8:30PM and would stop at that time no matter what was happening at the moment. The concluding time of rehearsals was later moved to 9PM, when it became obvious that 1½ hours wasn’t enough.

I was not sure at this point that the rehearsal schedule came to terms with the issues posed by double-casting, because Jim basically divided a single-cast schedule among a double cast. But time would tell.

BLOCKING – Jim and I met one afternoon and went over the blocking for the show. We only worked out “rough blocking” – basically, the entrances and exits and if possible where a character would stand, but not detailed staging of any scenes between the entrances and exits.

FIRST REHEARSAL – I asked Jim if he planned a readthrough of the play for the first rehearsal, and he said he was planning only for a “meet and greet.” He reasoned that the play might strike the cast unfavorably if they didn’t have an idea of how it was going to be performed before they read it.

So the first rehearsal began with everyone holding hands in a circle and participating in an “invocation” to the “spirit of creativity.” Then he talked about the play for a while; he asked me to speak, and I briefly said I found the experience an adventure and hoped everyone would approach it that way.

Then the major cast groups – chorus, dancers, musicians, actors of the central roles – went to different rooms with instructions to talk in five-minute segments to people they didn’t know. When we reassembled, everyone was chatting, the atmosphere was enthusiastic, and we once again joined for a “circle of gratitude” and ended the rehearsal.

There was a lot of conversation as people left that night. One actor expressed to me his hesitation about the “invocation” – as an active Christian he felt uncomfortable with it. I had thought about the same thing, and when Jim drifted over to our group, I told him what we were talking about.

He listened and the next time we talked he told me he was changing the focus of the first circle – at future rehearsals it wouldn’t be an invocation but more a traditional group fellowship moment. He was as good as his word. Eventually we dropped the “circles” as time pressures increased.

At the second rehearsal we staged the major entrances, exits, and placements for the actors. We did not, however, stage individual scenes, leaving that presumably for further rehearsals.

DANCE – Jim visualized, I think, a troupe of modern dancers playing a major part in the play – interacting with and surrounding the characters, leading transitions, sometimes interrupting major scenes to emphasize what was going on by striking movement. Instead of a troupe, Colleen, the choreographer, ended up with two women above fifty years in age, one of whom hadn’t danced before and one of whom had had two hip replacements.

Obviously the concept had to change, and it did. We ultimately reduced some thirteen instances of dance in the script to four or five. Colleen is skilled at using what people can do, not what they can’t, and she is adamant about not making people look uncomfortable in their movements. The result was a series of good-looking but simple movement pieces, striking to see but not complicated.

COMMUNICATION – Jim was an excellent communicator. In early rehearsals he did a lot of talking about the ancient Greek background of the production. He used email for extensive messages and kept everyone well informed – which I think works better than texts, which are cumbersome both to compose and to store. Here is one sample communication from Jim:

Hi folks.

 

    Just a reminder that our "musicians only" rehearsal is tonight, Sunday June 25, from 6-8 p.m. I'll be there a few minutes early.

 

     The goals for tonight's rehearsal are twofold: 1) make sure the musicians understand how long -- and at what tempo -- the various musical interludes they'll be playing need to be (so we can coordinate with the dancers); and 2) perhaps record some of that music (even without Luis's percussion -- he's on vacation for the next three weeks) so that when we need to rehearse those dance scenes, we at least have the tempo and the "feel" of the music.

 

     I'm aware that we have a few spots in the script that call for percussion only. We'll replicate that during rehearsal the best that we can.

 

      Thanks again for making the time to deal with these essential components of our performance. I really appreciate everybody's time and effort!

 

See you soon,

Jim

I can’t see how that could be bettered.

One important directing technique, which I have come to strongly endorse, is that he tried to give goals for each rehearsal. This communication practice frees actors to concentrate on a few specific things, and in the process, everything else is likely to improve as well. Jim followed this practice until we began full run-throughs, which were difficult to strategize because of absences.

MORE REHEARSALS – For the next blocking rehearsal Jim had arranged six rows of chairs, about 30 in all, half on each side within the playing area, making an interrupted semi-circle, a semi-circle of course being the shape of a Greek amphitheater.

The chairs reduced the acting area considerably; I sent Colleen (who was away) photos of the arrangement so she could start to think about what was possible for the dancers in the diminished area. Later the folding chairs were reduced to two rows of 5 on each side of the playing area, making it possible for actors to move behind the chairs.

At one rehearsal I worked with two performers (sisters ages 9 and 6) playing Young Antigone and Young Ismene (in a scene written by Jim) in a separate room for about an hour, with their parents watching, which was good because the parents would be able to reinforce what we worked on, including motivation, pauses, and clarity of speech.

Returning to the rehearsal, I felt most of the new blocking for scenes was static, but perhaps appropriate given the smaller stage space (which makes movement more difficult) and the formal aspects of the play.

Everyone agreed that diction would be a problem, because the space both echoes and “eats up” sound. Jim speculated on using amplification for the two young performers. Diction was always an issue; for example, I urged the chorus to say the word “evil” as “e-ville” rather than as “e-vull.”

I also suggested that the name of the city where the play takes place – Thebes – often sounded more like “Thieves,” which is definitely a misdirection. The fact is, however, that the actors never fixed this to my satisfaction, though I tried pretty much until the end of the show.

I felt differently from Jim about one aspect of the rehearsal. While the evening was a blocking rehearsal, he also gave acting notes, sometimes fairly detailed, and I feel it’s a good idea to give actors only one thing at a time to work on – it’s not like there’s not more rehearsal time ahead.

Also, some problems resolve themselves as actors continue to work on their scripts, and I think it’s good not to mess with things that don’t need messing with, at least not until convinced that nothing else will help. I also eventually suggested that he not interrupt the actors by saying “Louder!” and he did.

Jim visualized a remarkable pre-show presentation, with cast members as living statues and with interplay with the statues and the audience by “Zephyr, Master of Revels,” a part invented by Jim.

This didn’t happen, because of rehearsal conflicts and because the actor playing the “Master of the Revels” simply wasn’t often there. Finally, he and one of the actors playing Tiresias brought in a sort of Greek vaudeville sketch to open the show, not too different from Jim’s original idea but scaled down, at the last minute. A few days later, Jim cut it entirely as not fitting with the rest of the play.

[This was the initial installment of Kirk Woodward’s account of his first opportunity to work on a classic Greek tragedy.  In “A Directing Experience, Part 2,” Kirk looks at the final rehearsals and the performances of Sophocles’ Antigone, and concludes with an assessment of the overall adventure.  Come back to Rick On Theater on Monday, 16 October, for the conclusion.

[For readers who aren’t familiar with the theater practices of ancient Greece, I’ve appended to the final installment a brief outline of what we know or surmise about how classic Greek theater worked.  I hope you’ll find it informative.]